"Accessibility in Fedora Workstation" (fwd)

[blinux-list at redhat.com (Linux for blind general discussion)]

there are people using Linux in the console daily who deserve equal 
access. 
Second, this individual's job is to make this platform accessible...which 
has never meant blindness exclusively.
Further this individual is no volunteer, he is being paid to have up to date 
information, not just about fedora, but for screen readers he did not even 
reference like Fenial <spelling>
He is a single individual, That he has not seen a hardware synthesizer,  due 
to age does not mean they do not exist.
  Is he correct that speakup default installs to a hardware synthesizer?
I cannot imagine that being true given the work on the program.
What bothers me most are his lack of actual qualifications, and absolute 
dismissal of what he has not experienced..as if he defines Linux usage for 
everyone.
That attitude is dangerous, because he is educating those outside of the 
accessibility experiences, who will believe his ignorance is factual.
he has to be expert, it is his job.



On Fri, 12 Aug 2022, Matt Campbell wrote:

> Hi Karen,
>
> I carefully read and fact-checked what Lukas wrote about Speakup. He was 
> incorrect to say that Fedora doesn't include the Speakup kernel module; the 
> stock Fedora kernel has included it for a couple of years now. However, 
> Fedora doesn't include espeakup, speechd-up, or the Speakup user-space tools 
> (e.g. speakupconf and talkwith). I also couldn't find up-to-date 
> documentation on how to use Speakup with Fedora, whether during installation 
> or afterward. Such documentation is readily available for Arch Linux, on the 
> Arch wiki. So practically speaking, his contrast between Speakup support in 
> Fedora and Arch is valid. It also doesn't surprise me that a blind person who 
> started using computers as a teenager in 2009 has never used a hardware 
> speech synthesizer, and it's undeniable that these devices are now rarely 
> used. So I don't believe he said anything that could be considered slander. 
> At worst, his knowledge about the status of Speakup in the Fedora kernel 
> configuration was out-of-date, and I'm inclined to let that go, because we 
> can't all be up-to-date about everything, especially when giving off-the-cuff 
> answers during an interview.
>
> More importantly, I see no reason to doubt Lukas's qualifications for the job 
> he was hired for, much less to conclude that he's merely a token blind 
> person. His personal open-source projects are available on his GitHub profile 
> <https://github.com/tyrylu?tab=repositories>. Most notably, his 
> feel-the-streets <https://github.com/tyrylu/feel-the-streets> project is an 
> accessible interface to OpenStreetMap. That project's combination of Python 
> and Rust, and its ability to run on both Windows and Linux, demonstrate the 
> tolerance for complexity that programmers have to have to make progress on 
> non-trivial real-world projects. I would want to hire him if I could. His 
> atspi2_utils <https://github.com/tyrylu/atspi2_utils> repository also 
> demonstrates familiarity with AT-SPI, the protocol that enables GUI 
> accessibility on Linux. So he seems well qualified for this job, and 
> obviously he took the initiative to get the job. I'm excited to see a young 
> blind programmer working full-time on Linux accessibility. He could bring 
> some fresh energy to this space that seemingly hasn't been there for a while. 
> I look forward to finding out what he achieves.
>
> Matt
>